Maestro: 4 (The Herbie Kruger Novels)

by John Gardner

They passed through the front door into a wide hallway, which was more than your average lobby. This was enormous, with high windows and plants positioned to make it look more like a conservatory. It obviously stretched right back through the entire depth of the house, and centered in the far wall were a pair of huge French windows opening onto a formal terrace: very English, with stone urns sprouting flowers, and a spectacular view up the small valley which ended abruptly, about a quarter of a mile away, hard against the foothills, which rose and were swallowed up by the Blue Ridge.

  The topographical shape instantly reminded Kruger of the conjunction of a woman’s thighs. For a second he thought of Martha and realized he did not even miss her; then he mentally blushed to think that a man of his age, all of fifty-eight years, could still have the thoughts of a randy twenty-two-year-old boy.

  He turned to Passau, “Lou?” very serious. “Lou, you do not go out of those windows. Never, understand?”

  “I can’t take a walk in the yard?”

  “You don’t even go near them, Lou. Look up there, is a perfect place for a sniper. You go outside one morning and—boom!”

  “Boom?”

  “As in boom, where’s the top of my fucking head, okay? No going out there.”

  Passau nodded. “But how am I to exercise?” he asked. “My daily exercise is important.”

  “You’ll just have to extemporate.”

  Naldo almost corrected Herbie, but thought better of it.

  “You’ll have to do your pressings-up and sittings-up inside the house and away from the windows,” Herb said with the finality of one of those red statements which threaten legal action if you do not pay up.

  Maestro Passau shrugged, and Naldo continued with the grand tour. The owner had gutted the place and started from scratch with much flair and inventiveness.

  The left-hand side of the house was given over completely to bedrooms on each of its four levels. A door from the hall/conservatory led to a passage which, in turn, housed a door to the master bedroom, and a flight of smooth pine stairs which seemed to float upwards in a slow spiral. The stairs led to three landings, one above the other, from which passages ran to other bedrooms, equipped with bathrooms, Jacuzzis, “The works,” as Naldo said. “The works, like a stylish hotel.”

  Herbie quietly sang “There’s no place like home,” slightly off-key.

  On the right of the conservatory, a huge, broad, plain, polished staircase, also in pine, rose within a great shaft, the three floors above hemmed in by sturdy balcony rails, and supported by solid, ancient beams. Opposite, large windows were set into the right-hand gable end of the house. The wall, separated by a good twenty feet from the staircase, was dotted with large oil paintings of indisputable age. The owner’s ancestors, Naldo said, pointing out each one as they climbed upwards. The uniformed martinet had been at Blenheim; there were two somber-looking politicians from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; a cheery little goblin who, according to Naldo, had been the black sheep and dabbled in music: mid-eighteenth century; and a cleric who was once Bishop of Winchester, Naldo thought, or was it York?

  To his surprise, Herbie cocked his head and said if it were York he would be an archbishop. “Must have been Winchester, then.” Naldo did not think of Herbie as a man who had ecclesiastical knowledge. “Winchester or some such.”

  The first floor above them was cleverly divided, the largest portion being a dining room with a Jacobean table that would seat around twenty people; a barlike structure separated this from the kitchen, pine again, beautifully made fixtures and fittings, with ovens and hobs on different levels and all the modern means of survival from microwave through dishwasher to a refrigerator in which you could probably keep two cows. Naldo said the conversion had been done by Mennonites. There were many Mennonite communities in this part of Virginia, and their craftsmen had no equal.

  The floor directly above the dining room/kitchen was what the owner would call a drawing room, and above that the library, the shelves stacked with books new and old, many with priceless pedigrees. It seemed that the deceased oil magnate had invested well in rare books. In some ways this was the coziest room in the place, for it contained comfortable chairs, and a complex stereo system with rack upon rack of CDs and records. It was here that Herbie and Passau both knew they would spend the bulk of their time, and now it was in the library that Naldo worked out a shopping list with Kruger. Food, drink, staples, and even clothes and toiletries for Big Herb, for he had, as Naldo laughingly said, using the ancient argot, “got out in his socks.”

  They also made arrangements for clandestine communication. Telephone rings: three if FBI was on to Naldo; four get out fast; five to say all was safe and Naldo felt happy about coming to the place without leeches on his back; lastly, six followed by a pause to the count of ten, then a further ring at which Herb would pick up.

  “You are to give the five rings even if you come straight back with the shopping,” Kruger cautioned him, worried because he felt Naldo’s age was showing, and had not liked the fact that he had managed to sidle up to his old mentor’s car in Ruckersville and take him by surprise. “Please, Nald, behave like in the old days, like in the Cold War, full warning flags. If you can’t get to us, use some other method. This is all bloody dangerous. Somebody took serious potshots at Maestro Passau. They were out to kill, and I don’t know who is the ‘they.’”

  Herbie had also taken a good look around the doors and windows. The place was fitted with an expensive alarm system, but Kruger was rarely satisfied with home alarm systems that he had not installed personally. He asked Railton if certain simple electronic things could be purchased, and looked relieved when told that Radio Shack usually carried most of the items which came to mind.

  So Naldo drove away, and they waited: Passau sitting dozing in an easy chair, and Herbie wandering from room to room. Though he was a large man, and heavy, Kruger was light on his feet when the need arose. Even awake, Passau would have had problems hearing him: anyone would have had problems.

  When he returned to the library, Big Herbie Kruger stood, looking down on the dozing figure, and cursed to himself. He would not be able to start today, that was for certain. Passau was far too tired, and what had to be done quickly was going to take time.

  In his head he heard Young Worboys and Naldo’s son, Arthur, talking to him only a few days ago.

  “Herb, old sport, this man’s a time bomb, and you really do have to get to him pretty quickly.” This was Worboys, who had cut his teeth on operations with Kruger. Herbie thought of a line from a T. S. Eliot poem, “Here I am, an old man in a dry month, being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.” That was how it felt taking instructions from Worboys.

  “While the Americans are bound to be a trifle worried, we just haven’t told them the real angst. Only you know how close this genius is to White House sources; and only you know who talks to him, and I mean talks—very indiscreet. If he’s played his cards as we think, then the born-again democratic Soviets’ll know exactly how the White House is thinking; what they will do and what they will not do, and that’s one hell of a piece of information.”

  “Advantage U.S.S.R.,” Arthur muttered.

  “Game, set and match, as Len Deighton would say, ja?” Herbie grinned.

  “Shake, rattle and roll,” Worboys muttered.

  “You like Deighton’s books, Herb?” Arthur again.

  “Sure, Art. I read them from covert to covert.”

  In his corner, Tony Worboys smiled. “Don’t forget, Herb, that you’re the one person over there who knows what Passau was up to during his ‘Freedom Tour’ of the Eastern Bloc. The only person who knows the names of the people he saw, and the only person who knows he was in constant contact with the new underground—the hard-line underground, some of whom just tried the Judas kiss on Mikhail Sergeyevich.”

  “Ja, sure.” Herbie gave a dismissive twist of the hand. “I know it all: dates, times; places and people. I got it up here.” He tapped h
is forehead with his right forefinger and grinned. “Also the American stuff’s in same place. Inside thick skull. Can’t get out unless they take electric drill to it.” He widened the grin and Worboys thought of pumpkins and Halloween.

  Now, in the present, the telephone was ringing. Five times, so Naldo was coming in.

  “Nobody’s called my place, and I’ve told Barb to go out. I’m meeting her for lunch, but she’s been watching my back. It’s like old times.” Naldo seemed like a child allowed to play his favorite game.

  There was enough food to keep them for a week; shirts, underwear, socks, jeans, pajamas and toiletries for Kruger, as well as two boxes of electronic gizmos, batteries, wire, pliers and a small set of screwdrivers.

  Herbie paid him with Amex traveler’s checks made out to the Buckerbee identity.

  “Still playing spies while Eastern Europe finds its democratic legs,” Naldo said, with a wry look. “To hear it on this side of the ocean, it’s all over bar the shouting.”

  “On this side of the ocean, is what they want to hear.” Herbie did not smile. “Eastern Europe, a new anticommunist democracy? Believe it when it’s all done.”

  “Quite right, Herb. Democracies aren’t built in a day.”

  Kruger gave a caustic laugh. “You know what I worry about, Nald? My own old country. Somewhere, somewhen, a little guy with a Charlie Chaplin mustache is going to come popping out of the woodshed, and it’ll be Sieg Heil all over again. My own race still believes themselves masters of Europe. First they’ll take the economic market, then they’ll want other powers. Give it fifteen years.”

  “And the ex-Soviets?”

  “Come on, Naldo. It’s part of thousands of people’s lifestyle, for God’s sake. Nip and tuck, a little surgery, maybe. Open frontiers? Good idea. Open market if they ever get the hang of it. Mind you, works both ways. Sure, end of communism, but none of them have experience in openness. Democracy they know from nothing. Going to take a while. Couple of decades, maybe more; and in the very deep water sharks still swim.”

  Naldo would keep in touch, inform of progress in the outside world, if and when he could. Kruger gave him a great bear hug as he left. “Watch your back, Naldo. We don’ know good guys from bad guys no more.” Then the large man lumbered upstairs to ask what Passau fancied to eat.

  He found the Maestro carefully going through the CD and record collections. “The owner of this place has good music,” Passau smiled. “Got most of my recordings, but it’s a great collection. No Beethoven symphonies, only the quartets, which shows a serious collector; all Britten; the good Bach; plenty Mozart; all Jandek; some Bruckner, Penderecki, would you believe? A lot of Americans—Virgil Thompson; Barber, Copland; Gershwin—except the Rhapsody, thank God—and Bernstein. Ha, Lenny should be so lucky, he would have loved it, rest in peace: all three symphonies, the Chichester Psalms, and the Mass. Ah, and she—it is a she, Herbie?”

  “Ja, it’s a she.”

  “She’s on your wavelength, all of Mahler and then some. She has five recordings of the Second: mine, naturally, Solti, Bernstein, Inbal and Kaplan.” He browsed further, “Oy, and all of Shostakovich, some of it twice. This woman has taste. Strauss, all Verdi and Puccini. My God, and all Wagner, including my Dutchman. Now that was a recording session. Five weeks we took, with temperaments flying to all corners of the studio, and the orchestra—my orchestra—behaved impeccably, but the singers … no, I won’t embarrass them by even mentioning it.”

  “Good.” Herbie did not care if the singers had all gone on strike and chanted mantras. Passau glanced at him, a look of alarm crossing his face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Lou, who tried to take you out?”

  “Who? I have an idea who.”

  “Soviets?”

  Passau laughed, four musical notes repeated. Then again. “You think they’d be that stupid in this day and age? Anyway, why would the Russian democrats want to ice me, Herb?”

  “That’s for you to tell me. I need to know—and know fast—about the last four, five, years. Maybe more. Urgent I should hear about last two years.”

  Passau gave a shrug, using his arms as well as his shoulders, the hands turning outwards in an undeniable gesture. “I’ll give you all the help I can, Herbie, but it has to move in a straight line. Like impossible to tell you the last two years until we reach them. To help you, I have to explain the whys, and to explain the whys, we have a long journey. I told you already, Herb. You have to understand; and you cannot understand without hearing the whole thing. You think I was mixed up—am mixed up—with the Russians, in their toil towards a new freedom?”

  “I know you are.”

  “Then you know more than I,” Passau snapped, “and, in any case, who’s interested?”

  “History,” Herb gave another of his daft smiles. “History, Lou. The whole truth seldom emerges in history, but this time we should try to get it right. Cut out the myths and legends. There have to be great changes. Reorganization—CIA, SIS, KGB certainly. All of them have to be disbanded and rebuilt.”

  Passau looked at him as though he were a heretic; as if he, the great musician, was part of the Inquisition, ready to torch Kruger for his apostasy. “Too tired to begin now.” He sounded weary. “Too fatigued. Tomorrow, after I’ve rested, I’ll begin, and you won’t be disappointed. I promise. But don’t forget I am an old man now. I am ninety years on this planet, and I’ve seen everything. There can’t be much time left before I shuffle into oblivion. Can we eat, and can we sleep, my friend?”

  “Sure, Lou. You play some music and I’ll cook you good, okay.” He moved towards the stairs, then, “Lou, you aren’t kosher are you? I mean with food.”

  “Gave it up centuries ago.”

  Below, in the kitchen, Herbie prepared his great tomato sauce—oil, onions, canned tomatoes, tomato paste. He made meatballs, and boiled a large pan of spaghetti. It was all done to Passau’s own recording of the Bruckner Fifth, with that incredible finale—the composer’s architectural masterpiece, as everyone always wrote in the record notes.

  He went up to the library just as the overwhelmingly magnificent last movement reached its final bars, the drum roll and the hint of the fugue subject leaping out like clusters of diamonds.

  Passau was in tears. “Maybe I’m just sentimental, but, to me, it’s incredible that one, simple man could produce such glory.”

  He ate heartily, punctuating mouthfuls of food with traces from the music to which he had just listened. “You know, poor old Bruckner never heard the orchestral version of his Fifth Symphony. …”

  “No?”

  “He heard a version for two pianos—I think it was two pianos—but he was too ill to hear it in a concert hall. Incredible, yes, for a man who wrote ten symphonies—if you count the first one, not numbered—eleven maybe, but he didn’t hear the Fifth.”

  “We start work tomorrow, Lou?” Kruger did not want to get into a lecture on Anton Bruckner now. It was late afternoon, and the old man had begun to slow. Christ, Herbie thought, what if I don’t get to him? What if the bugger dies on me? He went on drinking the good red wine, Virginian—a cabernet sauvignon from Montdomaine—that Naldo had brought, while Passau sipped his Saratoga water. Then Herb assisted the old man to his bedroom, unpacked his clothes for him, and saw him settled.

  “You got no medication to take, Lou. Nothing the doctor ordered, no?”

  “Nowadays, the doctor tells me what I shouldn’t do, Herbie. No women, as if that mattered now, no booze, no smoking, but that all went years ago, when I was quite young. Comparatively young.”

  Kruger cocked an eyebrow. “Yeah, I know. After Greece. After the islands you gave it up. I read the books.”

  Passau smiled wearily, “The books lie, Herb.”

  “How?”

  “In the usual manner. You believe all you read? You think I’m an idiot? Herbie, I wrote the books—or at least made sure they didn’t say everything. You are talking about the two biographies, yes?
”

  “One official and one unofficial. I read them twice. So?”

  “So they both lie. You notice anything else about those books? I tell you, they present me as someone fully grown, someone appearing in Hollywood as a full-grown man. Only three paragraphs in one book, and two in other mention my childhood. All they say is that I was the son of a German shoemaker. No detail. Nothing. No education; no news from the old country. Nothing. But I talk too much. Tomorrow I give you the lowdown. Full background, warts, blains, boils and everything, like Book of fucking Job, ja? What time we start?”

  “Okay, I wake you around eight, huh? Have a little sleep in, Lou, then breakfast—what you like for breakfast?”

  “Three cups of black coffee.” Passau gave an impish smile which made him look ageless. “That’s been my breakfast for more years than I care to remember. Real coffee, mind you, not the frozen granules. The real thing.”

  “There’s nothing else but the real thing.” Herbie left him to sleep, knowing the night was far from over for him. The domestic security seemed okay: all the usual stuff, activated by punching numbers into keypads. Naldo had given him all the codes which were, predictably, years: probably the year of the owner’s birth, maybe the birth years of her kids and late husband. Why did they do it? He wondered. Always birth years or an amalgamation of birth dates.

  Anyway, Kruger was way ahead of Naldo regarding security. The last thing he wanted was the automatic warning going to a central control along the telephone line. The cops would arrive quickly if that happened. No doubt about it. So he disconnected the wiring and began to build his own little system, covering all the doors and windows, also the stairs on both sides of the house. A job done neatly and with great patience.

  As he worked, Kruger thought of old Naldo. It was strange seeing him again after so long. Strange and frightening, age bearing down upon his old friend and mentor. About one in the morning, as he worked on a sensor by the large French windows in the conservatory, he thought he heard the lap of water and the sound of a paddle steamer, then realized that his mind was playing tricks.